How to sell advertising on your website?

August 31, 2007 | By travs |

this tip was taken from internetmarketingsweetie

Selling advertising on a website can be a great way to create extra cash flow for your business. However, you could literally spend all of your time putting up ads and dealing with advertisers, if you aren’t careful. Here are a few tips to help make the process easier on you and your advertisers.The system – Manual or Automated?

There are plenty of scripts for automating text and banner ads that will allow you to accept payments and allow customers to load up their banners. These scripts will also prompt advertisers to renew or they can have an automated renewal. It will automatically take down ads that have been canceled or not renewed.

When I first started online, I set up ads manually and for the smaller amounts I was asking for advertising, it just wasn’t worth the amount of time I involved. Automation works for you because it saves you time, but it also helps the advertiser because they can get everything set up quickly.

Many automated programs also have the added feature of giving your advertisers detailed statistics and other cool features. You can search for pre-made scripts or have a programmer create one based on your own unique needs.

How Much to Charge?

Everyone wants an answer to this and realistically, it depends on what your advertisers are willing to pay. To test out the value of a potential ad spot, you can try running Google Adsense tracked to a specific channel. Another way is to run your own ads and see how well they perform. Your own earnings from the ad can help you decide how much the ad posts might be worth. Of course, there are so many factors in the success of an advertising campaign, so that would just be a guideline in setting your rates.

Selling Your Advertising

Make sure you have plenty of useful details to help sell your advertising, such as…

1. Screenshots or videos showing the different ad positions, so your advertisers know exactly what they’re getting into.

2. Talk about your demographics and why your website is the ideal place to attract potential customers.

3. As far as offering stats, web savvy advertisers will want to know unique page views and if you’re offering advertising on a specific page, they’ll want to know how popular that page is.

A note on statistics: You’ll want to make sure you know the difference between hits, visits, and unique visitors.

Hits: Hits to a website are a pretty meaningless statistic. A hit is simply the number of times each and every file on your website is shown. This means that if you have a web page that has 5 graphics, a video, etc…than each time the page is shown, numerous hits are shown. Hits are not indicative of overall website traffic.

Visits: This number tells you how many unique visits you’ve had to your site, not every file that loads when they arrive there. Using the same example as above, your stats will show your number of visits as 1 for each person that comes to your site.

Unique Visitors: Visits and unique visitors will vary from stats program to stats program, but here are a few of the more popular program’s definitions.

According to Google Analytics:

”The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be a ‘unique visit’. Any additional visits during the selected time period are counted as visits, but not as unique visits.”

The best thing to do in order to receive a true picture of your site’s traffic and the habits of your visitors is to really get to know your stats program. Be sure to determine exactly how your individual program classifies the different hits, visitors and unique visitors so that you can accurately promote your site to potential advertiser.

Hot Tip: As you get satisfied advertisers, be sure to include their success stories on your selling pages to help make you more attractive to potential advertisers in the future.